Welcome to Me

ICM 522 was an amazing class. It was tough and demanded a lot of time, but it was well worth the effort. I learned a tremendous amount about a variety of social media platforms and the analytics to support them.

I especially liked the progression of ICM 522. Each week I added a new tool to my tool belt, but that tool was also a stepping stone to the next week’s lesson. The class was designed in a building-block method that I thought was very effective.

I cannot begin to explain the amount of useful tools I will take away from this class, so instead, I will focus on the lessons learned.Read the rest of this entry »

I think Twitter is an extremely versatile social media tool that can bring people together to support a particular cause, but I think more times than not, that’s all Twitter will do. I think the only way it will cause people to create change is when that particular community is at a culminating point – it’s ready to explode – and people are ready to support the cause by physical involvement and movement.

In his article, Small Change, Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how four black college students walked into a Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960, sat down in a designated ‘white’ area and would not leave until the store closed. This amazing group of young people started a revolution. Little did they know that the next day, the number of college supporters would grow. Each day thereafter, the crowd continued to grow, and the movement spread to other cities across the south. All this happened without social media – Twitter in particular.Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a teenager, the one thing my mother could use against me was the telephone. When she was angry with me, she banned me from the telephone; the one thing in my world that connected with friends – one friend at a time. It was a harsh existence back then. Now not only kids, but people from every generation have the opportunity to connect with hundreds of friends at once. Oh, how the world has changed.

Facebook makes us feel connected – or is it? I feel connected to friends I have not spoken to in years because they are only click away. I’m updated on family events, job changes, relationship status changes and a host of other issues because of what they post and because of what I read. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re more connected. When was the last time I picked up the phone to speak to any one of my friends? When was the last time I dropped a birthday card in the mail to let them know I was thinking of them? For most of my friends, it has been a very, very long time.Read the rest of this entry »

Fighting is one thing, supporting the fighter is another. Supporting the fighter can often be a difficult task and the role is certainly not for the faint of heart. This is the reason Kristie, my class project cohort, and I thought it was important to include supporter information in our Scarred and Beautiful social media community. The fighter has a tough road ahead, but it’s even tougher with no support in place.

So when it was time to find a blog to follow for this week’s assignment, I wanted to focus on finding a blog that was centered on the caregiver. I found this wonderful blog called Cancer Support Community (Valley/Ventura/Santa Barbara) that I plan to use as a reference not only for this assignment, but for the Scarred and Beautiful community.Read the rest of this entry »

I had to choose a hashtag to follow for one week for a recent assignment. At first, my choices weren’t yielding any good results. If I plan to follow a hashtag, I expect it to be interactive with people participating. I finally thought to check #darwinawards and was pleasantly surprised to see that it was just what I was looking for. All that and a laugh or two.

For the remainder of the semester, Kristie, my classmate, and I will be building a community called Scarred and Beautiful. The intent is to have a place for women to talk about how scars from cancer has affected them and a place to find and offer encouragement. This week’s video assignment was to find similar communities and to use listening tools to learn more about them. I hope you enjoy the video.

We all know the story of David and Goliath; a young boy destroys a menacing ogre with a sling and a stone. The short story I am about to tell is similar, but it entails one internationally know author, Salman Rushdie (David), and Facebook (Goliath).

One weekend, Facebook decided to cancel Rushdie’s account without his knowledge. Rushdie contacted Facebook to request that his account be reinstated. Facebook wanted proof that Salman Rushdie was in fact Ahmed Salman Rushdie. Once Rushdie proved he was himself, Facebook denied Rushdie the use of his middle name Salman on his account and forced Rushdie to use his first name Ahmed instead. Rushdie had always used his middle name, as many people do, but Facebook would not allow it. Facebook did not respond to Rushdie’s requests.Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as I became a Facebook member, I noticed a good number of photos with verbal layovers. I didn’t realize what they were or that they had a name – the meme – until this class. Most of the memes I’ve seen have been simple, fun and clever.

I’ve seen memes transformed and I’ve seen them imitated. I think their potential for virality is equal. There are so many examples of each type of meme and to say that one has a propensity to go viral over another would be challenging to prove. I think it depends on whose inbox the meme hits and whether that person wants to imitate or transform it. In general, a meme is easy to create, it’s the virality that’s challenging.

According to Rice, “Memes are easy to make, but virality depends on novelty, cleverness, and luck, all of which thwart the duplicative craft of advertising.” I tend to agree. Although it took someone time to create a photo meme, it seems simple; almost as though anyone could do it. I think novelty, cleverness and luck are important components of virality. Novelty means that you have something new and unique, something that hasn’t been shared yet. Cleverness means that the meme is catchy in some way and either makes people laugh, think or laugh and think. Luck means that of all the millions of social media users, that one meme hit the right group of people at the right time to go viral. As Rice puts it, “Successful memes self-replicate, like genes in the cultural ecosystem.” I think that’s true, but novelty, cleverness and luck do help the process.Read the rest of this entry »

This was a very neat project. I had to choose to commercial (as in enterprise) viral video and a noncommercial viral video to discuss regarding how the each campaign used social media and whether or not I thought the campaign was successful.